Advantages of Event-Driven Architecture

The Event-Driven Architecture pattern is not new. The concept first originated in 2000, which was just prior to the dawn of what can be considered the age of interactivity and interoperability.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) approach departs from the traditional Request-Driven Architecture (RDA) method. With RDA, someone had to take an action specifically designed to obtain a desired outcome from the system to an event-driven environment. There, the fact that an event had happened caused appropriate responses to be returned by the system.

Top 4 Benefits of Event-Driven Architecture

1. Scales Easily to Provide Highly-Responsive Reactions to Events

To define this benefit through an illustration, imagine driving on a highway. Suddenly, your GPS system alerts that it is re-routing. It does so because something happened, an event occurred. In this case, the event was a traffic accident ahead of you. The result of that event has already started backing up heavy traffic that will delay you if you remain on this road. Instead, your GPS recommends you switch to a parallel route. It even chooses that route for you and directs you as to how to get there.

That entire process began with a careless driver not looking or not signaling before they changed lanes. An event that otherwise had no relation to you, and was not aware of you, just happened. The traffic monitoring system that detected the accident and reported it to your GPS guidance system was also not aware of you.

And you weren’t really aware of any of these systems either, at least until now. You made no request to be shown traffic patterns on the various area highways. In fact, you made no requests at all.

All these systems—including you, your GPS, the guidance system, and the traffic monitoring system—are loosely-coupled to each other, barely at all. But they all quickly coupled when the event was detected, so it could be routed and processed to notify you to take another route. The traffic monitoring system also coupled with many other systems to provide the same notification.

This is the greatest benefit of EDA. It scales easily and provides highly-responsive reactions to all manner of applications and access to data in real-time to fuel fast, effective decision-making.

2. Detects Events In Other Systems That Require a Response

The successful operation of the Internet of Things (IoT) is clearly heavily dependent upon frictionless interoperability. EDA enables highly-divergent, loosely-coupled systems to detect events happening in other systems that require a response. This, in turn, enables a new level of automation that is highly responsive—with substantial efficiency increases in delivering the right information to the right systems and people so they can make fully-informed decisions and take decisive action faster than ever before.

The loosely-coupled nature of event-driven architecture systems also facilitates rapid access to large and varied volumes of data generated by IoT devices and stored across various connected networks. Without the traditional overhead of integrated data access systems, more robust information is available faster and to more endpoints than was possible otherwise.

Resilience and fault-tolerance are also enhanced by the underlying nature of the loosely-coupled computing nodes that constitute event-driven environments. Should a node fail while processing a particular event, that failure becomes an event that is detected immediately—triggering the re-instantiation of that node to complete the required functions. Since event-driven architecture systems also record every activity, it is possible to recover from failure by replaying recent events to re-establish conditions at an earlier point in time.

3. Enables Asynchronous Functionality

The other fundamental characteristic of Event-Driven Architecture that is so tremendously valuable is that all functions are completely asynchronous, which completely discards the linear nature of traditional software design. No longer are developers bound by a highly-specific code that predetermines every action. Instead, the occurrence of an event determines what actions will be taken next. While this may be harder for developers to document, it provides unheralded flexibility and openness in system design.

Also, since EDA systems are self-documenting, they are also naturally optimized for use in real-time analytics. Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies will evolve this into self-healing, self-improving performance.

4. Provides Root-Cause Analysis of Failures

Perhaps the most confounding challenge in using EDA is the difficulty in providing root-cause analysis of any given failure. As event producers and event consumers proliferate, it’s more and more difficult to trace back activities occurring within and among the producers and the consumers. Like an interstate automobile pursuit, the most difficult transition occurs when the getaway vehicle reaches and crosses over the border—where the chase must then transition between the one state’s law enforcement vehicles and the other state. This is an ideal place for the getaway car to get away.

Event-Driven Architecture is just one of the methods our product development teams use to drive your success. Contact 3Pillar Global today to learn how we can do it for you.
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